Maps Intern - Summer 2027

About the Maps Team

Zipline builds and operates autonomous delivery systems that enable fast, reliable, and sustainable delivery for businesses and consumers, transforming how goods move in everyday commerce. To power this, the Maps Team is building out the long term scalable solutions that enable us to fly in new countries and regions as rapidly as possible. This team is responsible for building tools and services that produce artifacts used by our vehicles to fly their missions in the real world. This means the outputs from the Maps Team define the places our vehicles will fly in the world, their constraints, and provide strong priors for the real-time system on the vehicle to follow to accomplish its mission safely.

The Role 

In this role you will contribute to, build, and own portions of Zipline’s Maps stack. That includes contributing to an extensible path planning service used for generating routes that are operationally flown every day. It also includes a suite of services for data generation, transformation and access for path planning and flight data analytics. Your work within the team could range from path planning algorithms, validation of artifacts for compliance with flight requirements, to spatial data generation and data transformation pipelines. Your work will help us achieve multi-objective routing and efficient spatial data ingestion and access, enabling Zipline to serve more customers around the world. From this internship, you can expect to learn about how theoretical path planning algorithms are adapted for a real world problem, and how data and spatial search interact to enable routing in air. Our ideal candidate works well in startup environments, is comfortable wearing many hats, and is excited to learn about many aspects of how Zipline’s spatial planning works today.

What You'll Do  

• Work on services that generate routes and spatial planning artifacts
• Use tools to visualize and evaluate geospatial features that impact serviceability
• Work with teams to make spatial data accessible instantaneously anywhere in the world
• Improve planning algorithms to make routing fast, safe, and reliable

Examples of Previous Internship Projects 

• Prototyping a new path planning algorithm to enhance long-range routes
• Incorporating a multidimensional risk data into the routing engine
• Creating tooling for generating composite Digital Elevation Models
• Building infrastructure to enable our zips to survey large areas

What You'll Bring  

• Must have at least completed the second year of your Undergraduate studies. Masters and PhD students are also eligible
• Strong analytical and technical problem solving skills
• Deep understanding of algorithmic optimization
• Proficient coding and programming skills
• Understanding of automated testing practices
• Preferred experience supporting or developing novel algorithmic research
• Preferred experience with spatial data

What Else You Should Know

This internship is a full-time position, in-person at our South San Francisco office. We will host our Summer 2027 interns from (May/June - August/September).

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

Zipline is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. Please let your point of contact at Zipline know if you require any accommodations throughout your interview process.